"That’s what we want to talk about tonight. Because I am pleased to be able to tell you that, once again, for the thirty-eighth straight year, the Amway business opportunity is the best business opportunity in the whole world, bar none. I don’t say that with arrogance, I say that simply because it is true. And we work each and every day in Ada to keep it true." - Dick DeVos·  

The seminar for thousands of Amway distributors began with the familiar pattern of loud, patriotic and religious music, bright lights, music, prayer and speakers that go on until very late at night. It is hell on earth to now clearly see and partly understand the deception. I am physically sickened to be there. I have to continue my duties, running the back stage speaker area to not be found out. I think I am doing a fairly good job until Zack calls me over to where he is sitting. I go quickly to him, and he asks me how everything is going. I tell him how great things are and make the expected positive professions about the coming year. He seems to have accepted the answers, and I move back to my duties.

Understand that Zack is incredibly perceptive. It is almost uncanny, but in a crowd of thousands, he could pick out the few ‘problems’. I feel good to having kept my heart and thoughts concealed from him. This security is soon shattered as after about fifteen minutes, he beckons for me again. He just wanted to make certain that everything was OK with Kathy and I and that we were excited about the coming year. I again restate the appropriate positive confessions, with more enthusiasm. He seems to have bought it, but I am very nervous now. Sometimes it seems as if he could almost read your mind.

In about twenty minutes he calls me to his side again, and I feel myself beginning to sweat. He makes a critical mistake. He had taught us how to ‘reach’ people using touch, emotion and speaking softly. I have video of him teaching our leaders these techniques on his Island. He pulls me within inches of his face and puts his hand on my shoulder gently. He lowers his voice and softly tells me how much he and Molly love us and think about Kathy and I. He advises that they talk about us often, love us and know that this is our year. After nearly ten years in business, he does not even know the names of our children. He looked me directly in the eyes as he said this. He also used nearly every technique he had taught us. He used them in a way that he had taught us to work specifically for my personality type. It was so obvious what he was doing. I had been off tapes for almost two months and could now think. This was evil.

To use these techniques, looking someone directly in the eye and tell them you love them just to keep problems to a minimum is pure evil. I saw pure, raw evil in his eyes. It was a darkness that scared me. The rage exploded inside me, as I thought about how badly I could hurt him before his loyal security team took me down. I wanted to tear him to pieces. I trusted my family and all I loved to him. I had, for nearly a decade, looked to him as a father and sought his approval. Now he was attempting to manipulate my loyalty and emotions in a damage control effort.

I tell him how much I appreciate him and Molly and agree that this is our "Diamond year." He knows there is a problem, but he has no idea how large it just became. He later gets on stage to a convulsive standing ovation and goes through the same God, Love, Country and success talks that I now knew by heart. It is revolting to see all the new people there becoming freshly seduced. There is a pre-dinner break, and Kathy and I go back to our room. As soon as we close the door to our room, I tell Kathy about my encounter with Zack. This is like a terrible movie we are trapped in, playing roles we would have never chosen. We change into our tuxedo and gown and go to a brief reception with Zack, Molly, the speakers, Diamonds and other Emeralds. After about fifteen minutes, we are brought to a staging area for the Emerald and Diamond procession.

This was typically an emotional highlight of the day for most distributors. A path is made near the center of the dinner tables of the crowd of thousands present. The music starts and a blinding spotlight flashes our way. Each Emerald and Diamond couple is announced, one at a time, and walks through the wildly cheering crows to the sound tracks of triumphant themes like Rocky. It is our turn, for the last time ever, to walk the procession. I am sickened to be there. Ten percent of the whole group there are from our organization and are our family. We love these people with all that we are. Our hearts pound as the announcer’s booming voice calls us by name, and the crowd cheers. We walk into the bright light and flash pictures go off, as we move toward the front to our reserved table. People are reaching out and touching us and giving us high fives. We used to be so proud that God was using us to give people hope. We cannot do this much longer. It is killing us.

We make small talk with the other Emeralds and just try to get through the meal. My mind is racing. I am so angry and hurt at the same time. There is no one on earth that would like to have discovered all this less than me. I had wanted so much to be wrong. Zack and Molly are right by us at the next table. At the end of the meal, a distributor brings a new couple up to meet Zack and Molly. The young couple is polite and very excited. Zack works them well… long, firm handshake, encouraging smile, compliments, good eye contact, warm conversation, edification of the upline and talk of the business never being better. He’s got them. They were Kathy and I almost ten years ago. This cannot be allowed to go on. The young couple is on cloud nine but would be trembling with fear if they had any idea of the destruction that may slowly overtake nearly every aspect of their life, finances and marriage. The happy sheep walk, thankfully, further into the pen, not seeing the bloody axe behind the bible in the smiling butcher’s hand.

Kathy and I are now nearly paralyzed by what we clearly see going on around us. We’re off tapes and the psychological fog is lifting to a certain extent. The night session seems to go on for days, as the sweet poison is spread to the hungry flock. My mind is racing, as my heartbeat increases until I can hardly catch my breath. I have to stay cool and do my duty backstage to not blow my cover. I avoid Zack and make it through the night without further contact. It is past midnight when the group is dismissed. They are exhausted but motivated. We go to our room and change quickly into more casual clothes for the late night-early morning training session with Zack, Molly and the visiting Amway Diamond speakers. We arrive with a group of Emeralds and Diamonds and fade to the back of the room.

As I was someone that handled the speakers from the time they landed at the airport until they hit the stage, I know that Zack often gives them specific topics to cover. He is incredibly detail oriented and at times would even tell the speaker what analogies to use to make a point. Given this, I know that the Diamond he has in to speak to us has probably been coached, as nothing happens by accident with Zack. Zack builds up the visiting Diamond and admonishes all of us to take notes. The Diamond starts talking and tells us how much respect he has for Zack and Molly. They were his inspiration years ago, and we need to know how fortunate we are… God Bless America…. and nauseum….blah blah blah…

He ran through the required, typical, mutual admiration society points and then got on to his topic. Out of the blue, he launched into the topic of total loyalty. He said the people that made the most money in his group are the one’s who question nothing. The distributors who question upline always seem to have a problem that holds them back. Perfect loyalty breeds perfect duplication. The leaders are all taking notes zealously, as Zack can see everyone in this small room. Zack leans back in his chair, arms behind his head, and smiles in knowing agreement. This is scary. The one who questions nothing makes the most? Is Jim Jones going to come in here and serve us all a refreshing fruit-aide drink soon? As the topic progressed, the Zombies we were surrounded by took more and more notes.

I was shocked that so many bright, articulate people in the room accepted total and complete submission to the upline. They were very sharp people! It took extraordinary effort and skill to motivate them to the Emerald or Diamond level. None of them saw a problem. It just did not make sense to me. The people who succeeded the most were the ones who questioned nothing? What happened to the work ethic? I was brought into this business, because it was based upon serving others and getting paid for your effort. Now, it seemed as if service to others in the group and the incredible amount of time put into The Business was not as relevant as the fact of becoming a mindless, unquestioning drone. Of course, this exposure was only to a small group of Emeralds and Diamonds. None of the thousands of participants at the Dream Weekend seminar were even vaguely aware of what was expected of their leaders. The poison was sold to them in small, carefully packaged, bite-size chunks.

The analogy used to describe why information was only revealed in gradual stages to distributors was ‘you don’t feed steak to a baby.’ That was why we were instructed never to give a Dexter Yager tape to a brand new person. They would not be able to handle it. We needed to teach them, through the system, how to think and reason properly, and then they could understand his message. Most people, we were advised, just did not understand success principles, and Dexter had a hard time coming down to their level. We needed to raise them to a level of entrepreneurial thinking where they could begin to understand him.

I remember thinking he was a real ‘nut case’ when we first got started. After a while, his mannerisms and personality motivated me, because if he could actually be ‘off the wall’ and still be incredibly successful in Amway, so could I.

Normally, a few people would quit after he came in for a seminar and began blasting Democrats, gays, atheists, lazy distributors, socialists, Jesse Jackson, or whoever else came up in his never-ending, stream-of-consciousness talks. At one seminar, I remember thinking that he had mellowed out a little. The same day, he announced from stage that long-term distributors thought that he was changing and seemed a little more relaxed. He further explained that he was the same, but we had changed our thinking from being around him and the system. (I had no idea how right he was.) At the time, I thought it was a very good sign that I was ‘in sync’ with leadership.

The typical analogies used to force compliance were as follows: How hard would it be for us to build a group with a leader that constantly questioned us? Did God want us to work in harmony and serve His people, or to fight over ego and turf? How would we handle one of our own children if he or she constantly questioned us? If upline had a choice to invest time in you or in another distributor, wouldn’t he be smarter to put the time where it would be best used and not questioned? Would he be a good steward if he wasted his time and talents in your group, when there were more loyal, unquestioning leaders that could make better use of it? Upline only wanted to see your success and could be trusted. They only won if they helped you to win. It was business suicide to contradict your upline. You reaped what you sowed. If you wanted to reap trust and loyalty in your own organization, you first sowed it upline.

The Emerald "don’t question anything" meeting dismissed after 1 a.m., and Kathy and I went back to our room in a tired fog that was typical of these seminars. We were thankful we had finally been released from the meeting. We were far too tired to talk or even think about what we had heard. We just wanted to get out of our clothes and collapse on the bed. We had to be up in a very short time and dressed formally for the Sunday worship service. It was a Christian, non-denominational service, and all distributors were strongly encouraged to attend each of these major seminars.

Many had accepted the Lord or recommitted their lives to Him at these services, as I had. We had seen quite a few people in our group, even whole families, commit their lives and business to God. The worship service became very emotional, moving many to tears. The lack of sleep had a lot to do with this response, but the message that morning was still a powerful and moving one.

Attending the services was something that previously had convinced me I was doing something worthy with my life. Now, the sight sickened me. I could see that a personal relationship with God was used by slick leaders in what looked like a well-scripted, marketing tool. It seemed that the name of Jesus was spoken freely to bring credibility to something that had none. It also appeared that Christians were targeted for economic harvest with this superficial praise of God. I watched helplessly as the emotional and psychological anchors of deceit were being set within these people. When they thought about The Business, many felt a connection with God and commitment to family. Which of them would ever turn their back on God or their family and leave ‘their’ business? As I looked out over the crowd and spotted many of my dearest friends, I was overcome with grief. What had I done to these good people? They kept thanking me for giving them a chance. We had all been just like sheep. The butcher’s knife was so sharp that none of us ever felt the cut. We all just plodded onward and were bled dry! I was torn inside, because I really wanted to gather more documentation, but I could not force myself to stay a minute longer.

As I watched those trusting people being led to destruction, I broke down. I decided to leave four hours before the seminar ended on Sunday. I made up an excuse about visiting one of our distributors who was in a hospital from one of the car accidents and left Keith to fill in for my duties back stage. Being there and knowing what was really going on was like being in hell itself. Kathy and I packed our clothes and literally ran to our car. We still were unable to communicate much. This isn’t too surprising. We had worked hard for nearly ten years to eradicate all negative thought and speech. We knew that something was terribly wrong but were programmed not to verbalize our concern. The worst part was that we sensed an evil beyond description. Nearly everyone we loved was involved directly because of us. They were family. Our children knew them better than their own flesh and blood relatives. We were traumatized beyond description and unable to reason.

A new twist was now put on the Amway business. We had all been warned never to go on the Internet, because it was a breeding ground for rumors and negative, unfounded information. It had no practical use for someone going Diamond and served no business purpose, we were told. Having been warned of this for years, we were then introduced to Quixtar, a completely ‘new’ company being launched on the Net. It sounded just like Amway, but an online, Internet version. We were informed that Amway was building a new business with IBM and Microsoft as partners. Distributors were told that Bill Gates was really excited when he saw The Business model and had to be part of it.

Details of this new venture unfolded slowly. We were advised that the Quixtar Company was a Delaware Corporation and that it was separate and distinct from the Amway Corporation. It sounded as if the stock was held privately by the DeVos and VanAndel family members. The new business model was high tech and would bring in even more sophisticated professionals. Instead of dancing around the dreaded "A" word, distributors would be able to truthfully say, "Honest, it’s not Amway." The Quixtar company was to have the same marketing and compensation plan as the Amway corporation. It sounded as if the only difference would be in the name and the fact that distributors would be able to order their products online. I found this to be ironic, as I had been admonished for wasting time online, as I watched the web develop. This had potential, but it looked like the same exact deal with a PC and a new name.

We had seen Amway disguised as Home Shopping Delivered, Networking, Network Marketing, New Business Development, Yager Enterprises, Walters International and many others. This just seemed like the misdirection du jour, despite the Quixtar hype.

Out of desperation, I began to put my resume together. I felt like such a loser. I had let Kathy down, our children, our parents and all who had trusted me by getting into Amway. Countless people have told us they would never have joined Amway if they had not completely trusted us.

Quixtar would not change their lives. It would probably be used to extract even greater amounts of money from our people. I was so tormented and felt as if their blood was covering me. It was no longer just on my hands. I was immersed in it. I looked at all the pictures of these wonderful people and their children on our refrigerator. To this day, the pictures still hang there, because one never gives up on family. I was grief stricken. We were near bankruptcy. We could not keep up with all the credit card and mortgage payments. We had gone from being completely out of debt, except for a single mortgage payment, to having multiple mortgages. In addition to our mortgages, we were over $100,000 in debt to friends, family, and credit card companies.

How on earth did this happen? My auditing experience and natural talent for numbers and finances should have kept us safe. We had sold all our rental properties as directed. We sold everything we owned of value except our cars, home, and wedding rings. We had no investments left, no retirement account and no equity in anything. It was horrible, but we were still being lauded as being at the pinnacle of success. We were still chosen to do seminars by an upline that knew we were totally destitute. We were just a drawing card for them. We had been systematically betrayed and had ourselves unwittingly betrayed friends, bringing them into The Business to help them prosper. The truth now looked like we were just used as unknowing dupes to extract millions of dollars of book, tape, and seminar money from honest, trusting people who wanted to improve their own finances. We had unknowingly been used to rape the very people that had been entrusted to us. You will never know how many times I pleaded with God and cried out, "Oh Lord, don’t let this be true." I had been a collection agent used to rob the people that I loved the most. I had lost everything, while stealing from good people to make my upline wealthy. I felt as though I were drenched in slime. The nightmares became so chronic, so real and so terrifying that I tried not to sleep.

In every one of my nightmares, either Kathy, the kids, or I ended up dying an agonizing death in one no-way-out scenario after another. I woke up again and again hyperventilating and clutching my chest. I was often fearful that I was going to have a heart attack from the 24-hour-a-day stress. I attempted not to sleep, believing I could learn to live without rest. I made it almost three days and then collapsed fully dressed in a heap on my bed. I was losing weight, eating only sporadically. I thought back to the conversation I had had with the Amway Diamond (the one with the Mac 10 sub-machine gun). I was fearful that I would be killed if anyone found out, but I could not stop documenting the evidence of our betrayal. I strapped on a loaded gun everyday. I wore it so often that I would often forget I had it on my person. I attended our local church and Sunday school with it concealed. It became like clothing to me. I was a living contradiction, teaching in Sunday school about faith and trust in God, but having a loaded 9MM hand gun strapped to me at all times. I was a complete fraud. I had lost everything, including my faith.

I spent almost all my waking hours on the computer, despite the pain of what I was learning. There were many lawsuits against Amway and its highest-level distributors. Most of the complaints were over the same issues I had discovered myself. The more information I unearthed, the more I felt myself slipping from sanity.

The stress of battling all the years of training and indoctrination was so great it felt as if there was a freight train running through my head. I could not concentrate or even make the simplest decisions. I would spend over an hour reading our junk mail, but couldn’t remember a word I had read. Kathy and the kids had to repeat things two and three times for me to hear and understand. Because I was fighting to survive an enormous battle 24 hours a day, my goal shrank to just making it through one day at a time. We rarely had alcohol in the house, but I finally went out and bought beer and drank late at night to try to knock myself out. The haunting nightmares were more powerful than the numbing of the alcohol. I was a captive of my own mind; feeling so many raging emotions at once, it seemed as if I would explode. The pressure was so great it felt as if my head was going to burst off my shoulders. Sometimes, I actually wished it had exploded. I truly believed (at that time) that death would have been a sweet release from the unending guilt and torment. It felt as if I had been flung from a plane and was plummeting to earth without a parachute—but I never impacted. The drop was endless. I was in a state of utter terror all the time, and there was no rest. I believed that I was worthless. I had failed everyone that I knew and loved. I wanted to be a good husband, father, and leader. I was none of those. I had brought shame and dishonor to all who knew and trusted me. Since we had had a suicide in the family, I knew, firsthand, what the survivors had to deal with. So I would never do that to Kathy, the kids, or my family, but it did not stop me from wishing that I could kill myself without hurting them.

I was panic stricken almost constantly without knowing why. I felt as if I were no longer in control of my mind, thoughts, emotions, or actions. Having been an up-lifter and motivator for years, I was shocked at the darkness of what appeared to be my own thoughts. It was as if I was a machine that had been mis-wired, because I knew that I was not responding appropriately. I had never been an angry person, but I developed a rage that burned constantly just beneath the surface. I felt like a walking time bomb.

If the kids made too much noise at dinner, I verbally lashed out at them with no warning. I did not even know the anger was coming until it was there. The children were repeatedly reduced to tears, and Kathy watched me sadly, as I became a monster in our home. As soon as I reacted, I knew it was wrong and felt terrible, but I could not stop or control the anger. I normally left the room and cried quietly, as I wondered how to kill the beast inside of me. There was something evil in me. It was part of me. How would I kill the monster that lived inside of me when I was the monster? At times, I was completely numb, but when I was not numb, rage was the only feeling I experienced. I did not know who or what I was becoming. I did not know if the thoughts I had were my own or the result of thousands of hours of tapes and seminars. Who was in charge here?

I was so fearful of the night demons that overtook me while I slept that I decided to buy some rum to numb the night terrors. I drank it one night with Coca-Cola so that the caffeine would keep me awake as long as possible. When I found myself hiding the bottle, I realized that it was a problem. I knew intellectually that I was showing the same addictive behaviors as other people with drinking problems. I confided in a good friend and mentor in our church. I told him what I had just done and said that I would give the almost full bottle of rum to someone else, just to get it out of the house. Instead, he recommended I dump it down the sink immediately. I did exactly that, and it felt good. I still had no idea how to beat the terror of the night. I could not bear to witness another scenario in my nightmares where Kathy or the kids were hurt or killed again!

I felt as if I was in the backseat of a driverless car, careening down the road at 90 miles an hour towards a concrete wall. I could not reach the steering wheel or the brake. I felt completely overcome with an irrational feeling of complete terror and was never rescued from it by a crash and the sweet release of death itself. I was unable to tell Kathy just how desperate I was, as she had always looked to me for strength. How could I tell the one who was counting on me that I was praying for death? Little did I know, it was very obvious to her that I was becoming a complete basket case. (We were not able to even speak of those times for over a year.). Sometimes the pressure was too great, and I took a beer and a cigar down to the swimming hole on our property. Here I sat for hours with a loaded gun, can of mace, a beer, and a cigar. I don’t even smoke. I would stare into the flowing water, while frenzied thoughts screamed through my mind. I felt like I was drowning in the blood of the people that I loved the most. Kathy never knew if I would return alive from these walks.

These times of growing incapacitation were in stark contrast to the intense concentration I could summon at other times. You see, I continued to attend multiple open meetings, training sessions, and seminars in order to document a very well- orchestrated pattern of fraudulent conduct. I believed that when I exposed everything, both Amway and Zack would attempt to explain what happened to us and members of our global organization as an isolated incident. That was far from the truth. I collected massive documentation that was going to enable me to prove my rising suspicions. The documentation I uncovered was revealing that there had been widespread, systematic misrepresentation involved in recruiting and training Amway distributors for over twenty years. Those responsible were wealthy, powerful and shrewd—I would be crushed like an insect without complete documentation. I would probably be destroyed even with the documentation. I fully realized that, as an individual, what I was doing was like stepping in front of a tractor-trailer, but I had no choice. Our business had been built upon the premise that the Amway business had been founded on and steeped in trust, integrity, respect, and honesty. The Amway business and its related system now appeared to be devoid of all of those qualities. I had to expose this, because I believed the character traits were ones we had to live by and not just talk about. I had no conception of the price we would pay for this decision.

By March, I still felt that I needed more documentation. The pressure was escalating. I broke into tears, even in public, for no apparent reason. I would see a sad commercial on TV and start to cry. Being around our distributors and meticulously documenting what I knew to be true was hell itself. It was agonizing to repeat false, positive professions and motivational slogans to them. All of our Directs were expected to spend a small fortune to go to Arizona to another ‘Go Diamond’ seminar and listen to Dexter drone on about nothing. I could not, in good conscience, let this happen. My hand had been forced. Dreading the moment, I could not put the inevitable off any longer. I wrote a fifteen-page letter, complete with documentation, to send to all our leaders.

This was agonizing, as it was like throwing acid on our friends and family. Please understand that I was the one who had taught them to trust Zack in all situations. I helped them internalize that set of beliefs. I had helped teach them there was no other way to be happy, succeed, or fulfill God’s purpose in their lives other than through Amway. I had told some of their children how incredible it was going to be to go to Disneyland and see Hawaii when Mom and Dad went Diamond. They had watched me ‘retire’ when I was thirty. That had been one of many events that had encouraged them to dump thousands of dollars into the system year after year. I had helped sell them on being tough! I had encouraged them to take massive time away from their families for the short term in order to establish a lifetime of style forever. It was a complete hoax, and now in shame, I had to tell them what I had learned.

I prepared a packet nearly a quarter inch thick with court cases, video and audio tape transcripts, and revelations of what happened behind closed doors at leadership meetings and in high-level counseling sessions. I revealed to our leaders the fraud of the tool income and the income/lifestyle representations made by the Diamonds. A partial transcript of a taped, private counseling session with Zack was included. On the tape, he taught me, as a new up-and-coming leader, to cut off people that did not buy into the tool system. At the time, I believed the system was essential to success and, in fact, had a 100% success rate—as "documented" by the opulent lifestyles of the Diamonds. None of us had any idea it was an income source for Zack. As a matter of fact, we were led to believe that on occasion he even lost money on some events, but invested for our sakes.

I was still confused by the paradox of thoughts battling for control in my mind. Part of me now ‘knew’ that this had been a complete scam from the first day we were recruited. Another part of me also ‘knew’ that this was inherently a good business founded on solid Christian principles. In my mind, I felt that something went wrong with Dexter and Zack, but they could fix it. In sending out the letter, I was preparing for two diametrically opposed scenarios. They were in complete contradiction to one another. Part of me ‘knew’ that The Business was pure fraud and must be exposed to stop the harm being done to many good people globally. Another part of me ‘knew’ that the letter might put enough pressure on Zack to make everything right and honest. That was the reason that it was going only to my leaders. I could have mailed it to the entire organization. The part of me that still believed that that this business was salvageable, felt that the problems could all be resolved, and no one but the leaders would ever know what happened. As a leader, I had been conditioned to lead my people, and so I was still shielding the group from "negative."

The stress reached a near eruption point, and I confided in a few close distributor friends what I had discovered. They were sickened by what they learned but also felt compassion for us and for the position we were in. We were approaching a Saturday that was our monthly seminar day in our city. There was no possible way we could attend. We were terrified at the thought of coming ‘out of the closet.’ Our absence would be reported within minutes to Zack. We were destitute and being eaten alive by the stress. Don,^* an anesthesiologist in our organization, agreed to mail the many packages out for us and paid for us to spend the weekend in Washington, D.C. at Embassy Suites. We needed to remove ourselves from this boiling cauldron. The Arizona trip was coming up soon, and the exposure had to happen quickly. My hand had been forced. The truth of the matter was that I was still unable to make the decision to quit The Business. After the thousands of tapes I had listened to, it was almost impossible for me to believe that there could be life outside of Amway.

I had confided in Don about the intense, psychological problems I was experiencing as well as the nightmares. It was very difficult for me, but I needed some relief or help to keep going. He prescribed Valium for me. They were real knockout pills, and I was grateful to be able to knock myself out for three or four hours on occasion. I had never taken any medication of this type in my life and felt emotionally weak to have to resort to medicine. Survival was more important than my pride, and right then I needed to survive. I used them sparingly, according to the directions, and only as a last resort.

We left town. With the exceptions of Kathy’s caesarian section and a wedding, we had never missed a single monthly seminar, leadership, training session, or open meeting in nearly ten years. We felt incredibly guilty, as our people were there. We drove to D.C. and checked into the hotel. Kathy and I were far from relaxed, but this was a welcome break from what we had been experiencing. The kids jumped and romped in the pool and hot tub. At least, they were having fun.

Kathy and I agonized over the reaction that the group would have. The first call came on Sunday. A distributor named Chip^* called, and I could tell that he was very upset. He wanted to know if I was okay, because something terrible had to have happened for us to miss a seminar. He told me that I could just hang up on him if the question was inappropriate. He knew questioning the upline about anything was forbidden. My mind raced as I agonized over what or how much to tell him. I asked him to come over to my house the next day but to tell no one. He and his wife were new distributors and had become good friends.

Kathy agonized over the orders that night. All of our people called in their orders, and a concerned couple asked where we had been. We had a prepared story for them to hold them over until they got the package on Monday. No one really questioned us, of course, because we were upline.

Chip showed up the next day and looked ashen. He knew that I didn’t miss anything in The Business for any reason. I gently slid the packet we had sent to our leaders across the table to him. He was a large, powerful man but tears welled up in his eyes as he read the letter. He, too, was betting his family’s future on this business. He and his wife, like most active distributors in our group, had lost thousands of dollars.

He was too shocked to speak for quite some time. Being positive, I told him that I hoped that Zack would fix it all, and we would get right back on track. He was not convinced, but he had not been in the system that long either. I told him not to make any decisions until all the leaders had received the information, and we had a meeting with Zack. He told Kathy and me that he loved us and left in tears. He was obviously being torn apart by the same forces that were within me.

We called the Emerald couple in our group and arranged for an early Monday morning meeting with them. We felt we owed them the highest advance notice, as they had been through many of the same battles and hurts with us. They both read the packets in silence and nodded in agreement with its contents as they read. We all felt scared and relieved. The four of us were terrified of Zack, by this point, but felt we could not continue any longer as things were. We had shielded them from most all of this information until now. They, too, had suffered the wrath of Zack as well as that of Kerry and Chris. Being good soldiers, they, too, had kept the very negative, hostile situations from their organization. We agreed to just hold our breath and wait and see what would happen. They made a strange comment when they left. They told us that they were going to pretend that they had no advance notice of this. It seemed a little odd, but it did not really matter to me.

The phone began to ring off the hook, as our bewildered friends got their mail. For the next few days, the phone would ring the second we hung up from the previous caller. It was a cordless phone, and as soon as one battery would die, we would replace it with a newly charged one. We were on the phone nearly 10 hours straight each day. We began to set up face-to-face meetings with each caller at our house. One by one, they came over, and we answered all their questions. We told them, to their shock, that we had made only somewhere near $30,000 or less as Emeralds. They, too, had been told that Emeralds make over $100,000. Some were in such a state of disbelief that I had to show them all my tax returns. We discussed the fact that many of them were working day and night for years and were making a pittance for it. One silver Direct shared that he had shown a tax loss for his Amway business of $25,000 in only two years. He certainly believed what he was learning from our meeting.

Most were shocked and stunned more than angry. They all agreed with most of what we revealed to them but still looked generally confused. I knew that the Directs Kerry had recruited as his spies had faxed or hand delivered the packet directly to Kerry just as soon as they received it. Kerry, of course, would have immediately sent it on to Zack. Zack and Molly happened to be with Dexter in the Bahamas at the Atlantis hotel, enjoying one of the Amway lifestyle trips. They both had been sending out voice mails saying how great it was and that they loved us, we could do it, etc..... I was so used to the routine now, I knew exactly what Zack would say when he called.

As if on cue, he called and was very friendly and spoke kindly to me. He said he had heard that I may have some concerns, and he was open to talking about anything. His focus was to help Kathy and me go Diamond, because he truly cared. I did not buy it! It felt as though I was talking to a venomous serpent.

He acted as if he had not gotten the fax yet, but I felt certain that Kerry had forwarded it to him immediately. He kept trying to pry a conversation out of me, but I knew better than to let him get a toehold! I hung up on him. He called right back and spoke very kindly. I recognized his damage control movements immediately. This guy hadn’t wanted to listen to or help me for almost ten years, and now that I may have exposed him for having spent the last 20 years defrauding honest people, he suddenly was my best friend. It was late at night, and we had yet another group of confused distributors in our kitchen, witnessing the call. He tried to force me into a conversation, but I told him that I was not willing to talk about anything until he had received the fax and read it. I told him I had all the documentation I needed on him. He told me that he loved Kathy and me and began to go on about how much he truly cared for us. I had had it. I have to admit that I did not act professionally, and I lost my temper. I cut him short and screamed into the phone that he was a ‘lying sack of shit’ before hanging up on him again.

The distributors in our kitchen stared in a stunned silence. I had been their cool, calm leader that could solve any problem in a positive way. I was the guy that had convinced them that Zack was a godly servant, and now they heard me screaming obscenities at him. They were bewildered by what they were witnessing. The truth was beginning to look pretty ugly. But like me, they wanted reality to be totally different.

This was the beginning of hell week for us. I knew the game plan and had seen how distributors had been ‘erased’ when they left The Business. I thought I knew exactly what Zack’s plan would be. In the letter to our leaders, I advised them of Diamonds like Brig and Lita Hart that had been virtually erased from existence when the new Profiles of Success came out, omitting their picture and story. They, and other Diamonds, had been removed from the book. The long-term distributors had already been psychologically conditioned not to think about or even notice things like that. New distributors would never know the difference, as no one would speak negative to them. In the letter to our leaders, I told them about the meetings that were being planned to turn them around and erase Kathy and me. I even told them that members of their upline would treat them very kindly. I knew they would swoop in and act like their new best friends, feigning great concern for their futures. What I did not gauge correctly was the level of control upline still retained over my people’s minds. 

Kerry and Zack followed the playbook exactly as predicted. They arranged to have Zack do a conference call at Kerry’s house for some of our Directs and another call at Emeralds Rick and Paula’s for another group of leaders. I was not overly concerned; I had told my leaders exactly what to expect, and they were not stupid people.

Kerry and Chris began meeting with all our leaders at regular intervals at their home. I was certain it was at Zack’s direction, since Kerry did not even blow his nose without Zack’s permission. Zack continued to call me from the Bahamas to try to turn me around as well. He now was realizing that he no longer was dealing with a mind-numbed, fearful underling that he could bully. He finally told me that he would give me anything I wanted: my own training sessions, someone other than Kerry hosting the seminars, etc. I was growing more distrustful, as the conversation progressed. The things he was promising were what I thought I had wanted. He said that I did not even have to work with him and could tie into another organization for support. I recognized the trap.

He knew that we, as instructed, had promoted him as a near all-knowing leader, a backbone in the organization, and to go somewhere else would confuse and destroy the group. He sounded like he wanted to help, but I sensed he still had no sincere interest in doing the right thing. He was very shrewd, but his motive seemed only to be saving his own hide. I also sensed that he had confused a few of my leaders enough to turn them against me out of fear. I decided to test this. I agreed that Kathy and I would meet with Zack at his home on Friday, upon his return from the Bahamas. This was done to get him to stop calling me. I needed to buy some time to think clearly, as he was good at what he did: confusing and manipulating people.

Rick, the emerald in our organization, called us the next morning to see where we stood on everything, and I let him know we were meeting with Zack on Friday. He told me that he felt we could work with this. We spoke of Zack and our mutual mistrust of him. He said that in the Bible, Daniel suffered under an evil ruler named Nebuchadnezzar and still helped thousands. He felt we could do that too. I could not submit my family or my friends to the rule of an evil leader, even for a test of some kind. But I did not tell him this, because I did not know if I could still trust him. He was asking too many probing questions that sounded like questions Zack would have asked. I decided to test him. I told him that all Zack had to say to resolve this was that he had misread the situation all these years and was sorry for not taking care of it. He just needed to acknowledge what the four of us had been telling him for years. My phone rang early the next morning, and it was Zack. The first thing he said was, "I am sorry for totally misreading the situation for all these years."

I realized that Rick had sold out, reporting on me to Zack, while Zack would do or say anything to put the fire out. I said the right things to Zack only to appease him and let him believe we were still on board for the Friday meeting.

You must understand that in my heart of hearts, I truly wanted to have the meeting. I wanted to witness a miracle and learn that he was honest and that all this had been a big mistake, and he could make it right. The little voice that had once been a whisper in my soul was now audible after months of not listening to any of the tapes.

Over the phone, Zack acknowledged the problems and said he would fix everything, but I was still very uncomfortable. I did not trust him or my own ability to think things through yet. My head was spinning. He was kind and very amicable, not argumentative or combative about anything. I just wanted this to be a good, honest business. He told me he loved us again. I decided to test him. Before he hung up, I asked him the names of our children. After nine years, he should have known their names. He had no idea what their names were. He apologized and said that he didn’t ever remember me mentioning them by name.

With all that, I dropped my guard. As incredible as it sounds, he managed to convince me that I could make Diamond in no time through Quixtar, and soon I would have no financial worries. He convinced me that we could be EDC (Executive Diamond) in two years and make a huge fortune and help many people. This, he advised was "better than the alternative." I did not tell Kathy much of this but agreed to go to the Friday meeting at Zack’s mansion. He got me back "in". Despite moments of clarity, my mind could not understand the truth or reason clearly yet.

Every one of our leaders was calling almost daily to find out what was going to happen. We finally got the phone to slow down a little, once we told them of the Friday meeting. Many kept coming over to see us in person after meeting with Kerry and Chris. Then a very strange phenomenon began to occur. The more we told them and the more documentation we provided, the more confused they became. The brainwashed glaze and perpetual 1,000-tape smile was gone. They had been replaced by tired looks of complete anxiety and fear. We could tell most of them had no idea what the truth was by that point. I could not understand what was happening! I had to figure it all out on my own. I had not had the luxury of having someone else doing all this research for me, trying to protect me. No one simply gave me over 50 pages of documentation to save my future. After meeting at Kerry and Chris’s house, some of our closest friends began to grill us with really personal questions. We did not understand what was happening. Some asked strange questions and were evasive about why they were asking. Some became strangely silent when we asked them about the meetings with Kerry and Chris. We had nothing to hide, because we were telling the truth, but their embarrassed looks seemed to imply another kind of shame.

While we were puzzled by this new response, I was more anxious and even fearful about Friday’s meeting with Zack. I talked to a Direct Distributor in our organization who was a homicide detective in State College. He knew Zack well and advised me, as a friend and a police officer, that under no circumstances would he want us to meet with Zack alone at his house. That sounded like good advice. I called Terry, another Direct in our organization, a very successful businessman and CPA. We thought he would be a great mediator, and he had tremendous respect for Zack. He agreed to attend the meeting for the benefit of all. I sent Zack a voice mail and told him that Kathy and I would be glad to meet with him on Friday, but it would have to be at a public restaurant, and Terry would attend as a neutral third party. That should help avoid any confusion during our discussion, concerning keeping this business honest and free from abusive practices.

In the meantime, Kathy and I dropped in on Don and his wife to thank them for sending us to D.C. I told him about our meeting scheduled for Friday and that we were resolving all the challenges. I explained to them that Quixtar was a whole new business and might not have the same emphasis on the tools. Don was normally a very calm, quiet man, but when I told him about Quixtar, he went ballistic on me, right there in his living room. He started jumping up and down, pounding his fists on his legs and yelling that these were the same people who had been lying to us and screwing us for years. He kept yelling, "It’s the same people!!!!" again and again. His face was beet-red from yelling so loudly. We left quickly, surprised at how negative he had become. (Obviously, my capacity to break free of the system-induced psychological coma was still impaired.)

I got home from this scream-fest and checked my voice mail. As was normal, I had turned on my tape recorder and began to play and tape my messages. For a moment, I was actually relieved to hear that there was a message from Zack, but my life changed forever as he spoke. He told me that he did not want to take part in any meeting with any "witnesses" or anything that I would want to put together. No witnesses? Was this the Mafia, or what? It was over. In my heart, I now felt certain my former hero, mentor, and father figure was not a man of honor and integrity. With everything that was in me, I had wanted to be wrong. I had wanted to fix this for my friends. We had all believed that The Business was our future. We were going to succeed and impact the world in a positive way. Now, it was over. I felt deep regret for all of us. We had been an incredible team. Grief is the only word that I can use, and even that just barely touches the emotion that wrapped its icy fingers around my heart. The truth was now clear.

The last few months had been some of the most profitable we ever had in terms of monthly gross income. Quixtar seemed to have some real potential, particularly with alleged "partners" like Microsoft and IBM. Zack had been verbally agreeing to give us the freedom to build our business; yet I knew, I was figuratively ‘a dead man walking’ for challenging him. I did not trust him at all. I could not submit myself or my family or my friends to a corrupt leadership. My only choice was to walk out and let go of our dreams. I knew that our exodus would destroy what Kathy and I had spent years to build.

We soon would have to declare bankruptcy. Out of moral obligation, I was about to destroy my only income source. The costs would be high, but there were too many good people, looking to us for leadership, for us to think of ourselves. I knew that our organization would hear lies about Kathy and me, about why we left The Business. I prepared a letter that I faxed and mailed certified to Zack. I also read it to him on voice mail and sent a copy of the voice mail to all of our leaders. Below is the portion of the letter to Zack, explaining the true reason for our exodus from ‘our’ business.

For years, our phone had rung almost non-stop with a flurry of activity from our friends in The Business. Soon after sending out the voice mail with the above message on it, our phone grew strangely silent. It would never again ring non-stop with news from our group.

They were family, and we had been in constant communication with them. The silence, at first, was a welcome relief from the frenzy of calls that we had experienced during the previous week. We had a few sporadic meetings with some of our leaders. Those meetings were strained and very uncomfortable. They tried to convince us that The Business wasn’t all bad. There were some good things about it. Many were inordinately concerned, "What was everyone else going to do?" I found the constant questions regarding what everyone else was doing to be very odd. It appeared that the entire recruitment and training process was based upon complete misrepresentations of the truth. They began to argue with me as if I was a negative prospect, and they had just shown me the plan. I brought up the fact that they were making little or nothing after years of work and after dumping tens of thousands of dollars into their business. They robotically explained the principles of business ownership and investing. I recognized that thought process, because I had taught it to them.

They did not believe much of what I had been telling them about our situation. In fact, they had been led to believe that Kathy and I just screwed up. Emeralds all made a lot of money, they told me. I showed them the tax returns again. They were blocking the information out, being unable to process it. I could not get them even to look at their own tax returns. The one distributor that was a Silver Direct told me that he had lost $25,000 during the past two years. He had business savvy and managed some large businesses in our city. But he turned all the information around and explained to me that this loss actually had helped him, because he got somewhere near $6,000 in tax refunds, helping him to pay his debt down.

What insanity! He was a sharp businessman, yet he was in such a zombie-like state that he was rationalizing the benefit of taking huge amounts of time away from his family and losing $25,000. His wife had confided in us the prior week that she had come home and found their son curled up in the fetal position, crying hysterically, because he had no friends. They had been so busy going nonstop, building their Amway business, that they had no time to take the kids anywhere to do things with their friends. She was overcome with grief and guilt for having abandoned them. That was last week, though. This week they were trying to sell ME on how wonderful life really was for them. I did not understand what was happening.

We still communicated with most of our leaders. Zack had been calling me to the point where we felt that we were being harassed. I asked him to stop all direct communication with me and to run it through my local attorney. He still called twice in one night and would not identify himself to Kathy. We recorded the numbers from our caller ID for documentation. He called back a third time and was talking in a friendly manner, as though we were buddies. As was now usual, we had a distributor couple at our home who witnessed this. It was pathetic. I advised him that I would file harassment charges if he ever called again. He had let me know in a previous conversation that he sent a copy of my letter to his attorney. He was bluffing me. I had anticipated that Zack would react like that with bullying tactics. I told him that I was not intimidated by this saber rattling.

I knew that he was not going to sue me for defamation of character or anything else. I knew he did not want to have any of this information going public. He would never jeopardize this rotten truth about The Business by having it become common knowledge. I told him that I was no longer fearful of him and to feel free to have his attorney file suit against us. He said that he had no intent of doing that and wasn’t actually threatening but just wanted to inform us of his actions. He had sorely underestimated me if he thought I was about to go away quietly after what he had done to us and to thousands of other innocent people.

I heard less and less from our leaders in the next few days, only that Kerry, Chris and Larry were having a meeting with them at a local Quality Inn. I also heard that Zack had agreed to let Rick and Paula order and pick up directly from his office, so they would not have to deal with Kerry and Chris. Everyone was still strangely unsure as to what they were going to do. Confusion was rampant. I was certain that about 95% of them would just quit. It was a sorry thing, but somehow we would all rebuild our lives. Some distributors came over, and we talked about all our hopes and dreams being gone. I explained how finally these dreams could truly become possible. Now that we were out of Amway and were not being bled to death financially, we would have the time and resources to truly live our dreams and be with our families. Logically, I knew it was completely true. But in my heart and spirit, I did not believe any of it myself. It felt as if our lives were over. There seemed to be no hope.

We continued meeting with our friends, who seemed to be more and more mixed up by what they were hearing and learning. At times, they almost sounded like robots, as they regurgitated the positive aspects of The Business. After about a week, I noticed one particular pattern. Three of our Direct distributors shared that The Business was good, because they had retired their wives with it. They stated this with complete sincerity.

Look at each case. The first was the Ruby Direct, who was working nearly seven days a week now and had been in The Business nine years. He was making, by his own admission, around $4,000 a year and rarely saw his children. His wife had worked for the school district, where she had a solid job with benefits. The second was the Silver Direct, who just the previous week had shown me a loss of $25,000 in the last twenty-four months. His wife had been a teacher. The third was John, a Profit Sharing Direct, who worked at a concrete plant and had talked about having to go to his bank, because he was tens of thousands in debt. His Amway business was probably showing a huge annual loss.

The important thing was that their wives were home and not submitting to another man. We had been thoroughly trained that it was a great embarrassment for a woman that was a Direct not to be a full-time mom. It was just expected. Even those without children were pressured to quit their jobs to help their husband build ‘their’ business. In retrospect, I can see the reason for this tactic. Without the wife’s income, both were even more desperate to build a successful Amway business. After open meetings, the leaders would get up and state their current or past professions. The women were very proud to say that they were stay-at-home moms. The reduction in income and the increase in expenses were part of what sent some of them spiraling into massive debt. ‘Freedom’ was all that mattered, and it gave the group the false belief that they would have a good income at the Direct level. This further perpetuated the whole cycle of deceptive recruitment. We certainly thought there was a lot of money in The Business, when we saw that women did not have jobs and most drove Cadillacs. It was all smoke and mirrors, at an enormous cost to those who believed it. 

"The story of Amway is one of the greatest success stories of all time. In less than forty years, a small company in from Ada, Michigan – with one product and a handful of salespeople – has perfected and fine-tuned referral based marketing and built one of the most successful business enterprises in the history of commerce. Their network of Independent Business Owners encompasses 3 million people in eighty different countries and territories"^* -Coy Barefoot

Chapter 12